FamilyLeaf, The YC-Backed Social Network For You And Your Kin, Adds 4 Advisors And A Snapchat-Like Feature For Sharing
When the family-based social network FamilyLeaf first made its debut as part of the Y Combinator Spring 2012 class, the startup set itself up as a kind of anti-Facebook: a place where relatives could come together in a private network built with family networking in mind without some of the trappings like advertising and the wider sharing with your network of friends (and, as we’ve seen, friends of friends) that have put some people off the world’s biggest social network. Fast-forward to 2013, and that concept is now evolving. People who have opted out of the Facebook scene can still use FamilyLeaf, but for those who have not, the startup is getting ready to turn on a Facebook integration so users can tap their social graphs to help find family connections. The move is part of a bigger set of changes at FamilyLeaf, which — much like families themselves — is now growing up. On the back of a seed round from some well-placed investors (a seed round that the founders and investors do not want to discuss publicly just yet), FamilyLeaf has recruited several new advisors, added a new co-founder, and introduced some new features, including a new messaging service called Tidbits. The new advisors – Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Zillow; Nirav Tolia, CEO of Nextdoor; Rebecca Meissner, former director of Product at Branchout; and Kartik Hosanagar, Wharton professor and angel investor in companies like Lovely — in part speak to how FamilyLeaf wants to pitch itself going forward. Zillow’s strength has been in building a massive online real estate listings business that is, at its heart, a big data play; the neighborhood-based social network Nextdoor is a lesson in how to build a social network around a specific community. Branchout’s ability to navigate a Facebook integration for a social network that is aiming for something different than what Facebook can provide (something Lovely, too, has done with its Craigslist integration) is a paradigm that FamilyLeaf hopes to adopt as it looks to make it easier for its members to grow out their networks. Meanwhile, the new co-founder, Henry Liu, was in the same YC class as FamilyLeaf’s original co-founders, Wesley Zhao and Ajay Mehta. At 17, he was one of the youngest ever to have come through the YC program, and some of that may have shown in his work there — he arrived with one idea and a recently-met co-founder, pivoted during
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Want more proof that the private, mobile social networking space is exploding? Today, there comes yet another entrant into the game: an iOS and web application called 
Do you want to get a slot as part of the next batch of Y Combinator startups? Are you curious about what the founders chosen for the program did to get there? If your answer is yes to either of those questions, then read on.
Facebook is on its way to having a billion members, but it’s not always making friends everywhere it goes. Two young men, both aged 19 and in the most recent crop of Y Combinator startups, think they’ve found a gap in the market that has yet to be served that well by the social network: families.